US of A Justice System

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ATF used traveling, well-paid informants in ABQ sting. One of the men who helped the federal bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) search for potential targets in a sweeping undercover drug and gun sting operation in Albuquerque last year is paid an $80,000 annual salary, court filings show.

Pulled over for traffic violations, Jauch was held for 96 days in a Mississippi jail in 2012, on a felony drug charge, without seeing a judge, getting a lawyer or having a chance to make bail, even though a police video showed she committed no crime. ACKERMAN, Miss. — Pulled over for traffic violations, Jessica Jauch was held for 96 days in a Mississippi jail without seeing a judge, getting a lawyer or having a chance to make bail.

She was charged with a felony based on a secretly recorded video that prosecutors finally acknowledged showed her committing no crime. Only when she finally got a hearing and a lawyer, who persuaded prosecutors to watch the video, did the case fall apart. Then, the 34-year-old mother sued, alleging violations of her rights to bail, legal representation, a speedy trial and liberty. U.S. Still pending before U.S.
L.A. to pay total of $24 million to two men freed after wrongful convictions. The Los Angeles City Council agreed Tuesday to pay more than $24 million to settle lawsuits from two men who alleged that investigations by dishonest LAPD detectives led to their wrongful murder convictions and caused them to spend decades behind bars.

Kash Delano Register, who won his freedom in 2013 after lawyers and students from Loyola Law School cast doubt on the testimony of a key prosecution witness, will receive $16.7 million — the largest settlement in an individual civil rights case in the city’s history, his attorneys said.
How Police Officers Seize Cash From Innocent Americans. On February 17, 2014, a 24-year-old college student named Charles Clarke checked a bag at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and parked himself in a chair near the boarding gate.

Why the Darknet Matters. By Luther Blissett and Fernando Villalovs of Arkesoul In February 2015 Ross Ulbricht was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics for his role (either with or as Dread Pirate Roberts) in creating and administrating the darknet market Silk Road.

For this, U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison without possibility for parole.
Mississippi judge shrugs off innocent until proven guilty: People charged with crimes are criminals. Circuit Court Judge Marcus D.

Gordon (C-SPAN) A Mississippi judge displayed a startling lack of concern with constitutional rights during a one-on-one interview. Circuit Court Judge Marcus D.
How Wall Street’s Bankers Stayed Out of Jail. Business The probes into bank fraud leading up to the financial industry’s crash have been quietly closed.

Why is Rev. Edward Pinkney in Prison? Another Case of Political Persecution. Why is Rev.

Edward Pinkney in prison? One answer comes to mind from my very first meeting with Pinkney in 2003. I drove from Lansing to Benton Harbor in southwest Michigan to witness a Berrien County Commissioners meeting soon after the Benton Harbor uprising. At that eye-opening introduction, white commissioners literally laughed at Black community members’ desperate appeals for justice for their young Black men, incarcerated or killed with impunity at a sickening rate. From this vignette straight out of the Jim Crow South, I left 90% white St.
‘For $12 of Commissary, He Got 10 Years Off His Sentence.’
End Prosecutorial Immunity. Period.
Prosecutorial misconduct is a reality.

So is the lack of any meaningful legal recourse for its victims. Over at The Daily Beast, Jay Michaelson uses the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to draw attention to this pressing and increasingly well-documented problem. Michaelson notes that among the most important impediments to holding prosecutors accountable for abuses of their authority is the fact that “prosecutors are granted immunity for most kinds of misconduct.” While federal law authorizes civil suits against government officers who violate constitutional and statutory rights, the Supreme Court has insulated prosecutors against liability by holding that they are entitled to absolute immunity from civil damages for actions taken as advocates. Simply put, when prosecutors violate our rights, no judge-created rule should prevent them from being held civilly liable.
Huffingtonpost.

Denver man charged with seven felonies for handing out 'jury nullification' fliers outside courthouse. The New Science of Sentencing. C riminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record.

In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future. Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign. Risk assessments have existed in various forms for a century, but over the past two decades, they have spread through the American justice system, driven by advances in social science.
FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades. The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.